But as for that, the whole heavens and earth and all the universe were blankly void of suggestion. I could think of nothing that offered the slightest chance of success. To drop a step behind, to give him a sudden wrestler’s back-throw and afterward to bind and gag him were all simple enough. My six feet of good, sound, country-bred Virginia bone and muscle would answer for these primitive beginnings. But having trussed my fowl, I should be like the man who stole a hobbled horse, which he could neither carry nor ride. I could never hope to escape out of the high-fenced garden with my captive, or to reach the river unhalted, or, reaching it, to have the fairy luck of finding a boat with oars shipped and waiting for me to pull away in.
One of these difficulties—the least of them—overcame itself as we were wheeling to make one of our face-abouts at the lower end of the walk. A board in the high fence paling had been displaced, and when I touched it with my foot it fell outward with a dry clatter and left a gap in the enclosure.
“Your boundaries are tumbling down, General Arnold,” I remarked carelessly; and he replied that it mattered little, since they would be another’s boundaries very shortly. After which he paid no more attention to the gap opened by the falling board; but I did, and every time we made the turn at the walk’s end it tempted me. If I only knew what lay beyond: how far it was to the river’s edge, and what one of a thousand chances I might have of finding a boat unlocked and with oars in it!
But I did not know, could not know; and thus the irresolute “I dare not,” waited upon the “I would,” and I was alternately fever-hot with excitement and shivering in depression, the thing to be desired being so near and yet so inimitably far.
It was some time after the incident of the gap-opening, and while we were passing a point midway between the house and the garden end, that Arnold stopped short in his questioning about the Portsmouth harbor to hold up a finger for silence.
“What was that?” he asked, and I saw his other hand disappear into one of the pistol-hiding pockets.
“I heard nothing,” I made answer, which was the truth.
“It was a sneeze or a cough,” he commented; “I am certain of it.”
The pause gave me time to look around more precisely than I had been able to while he was holding me in talk. The scrubby trees and evergreens might possibly have sheltered an eavesdropper, but not safely. Besides these there was nothing in the garden that would have concealed a cat.
“It was the sentry in front of Sir Henry Clinton’s quarters,” I suggested.